Interplay It Again

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Odd timing, this – on the same day that Obsidian, a company formed from the ashes of Black Isle, finally step out of Bioware’s shadow and announce their own game, we also see the return of Black Isle’s much-troubled owners, Interplay.

Interplay.com now hosts this excited image:

and a Coming Soon message. See the full pic here. Going left to right, we’ve got MDK, Earthworm Jim, Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance, and apparently the browny-green bit underneath the Interplay logo is concept art from Fallout Online. Edit – and Descent on the far left.

Goodness, how exciting. Although seems unlikely a rejuvenated Interplay is going to suddenly announce new games in all those franchises, – though they’ve previously intimated they do want to pursue sequels to all of them. It’s more probable this is a spot of ‘hey, remember us and all the cool stuff we’ve done’ promotion to encourage folk to take the publisher seriously again. But why?

N4G suspect Interplay are about to submit a new performance report – so perhaps the publisher’s finally got some money to spend on new games. If so, what? Lest we forget, Interplay’s deal flogging off the Fallout 3 rights to Bethesda did stipulate that they got to hang onto Fallout Online, so long as they started working on it within two years from last April.

Amusingly, here’s a post from proto-RPS last year that I don’t even remember writing, sniffing at the Bethesda-Interplay arrangement and the then-current state of the latter’s coffers. Look at it, all virginal with its zero comments, no disparaging accusations of reporting rumours, grammar nit-picking or perfect strangers calling each other names. Ah, simpler times.

1) Valve have hinted that they have signed a new partner for game content on their Steam service.
2) Interplay have come from the clouds to be a player in games again. When was the last time they even published a game until now, out of curiosity?

You can forget about Freespace unless it was done on a really tight budget & by some one other than Violition. Those games are really niche and just don’t sell in large numbers plus Violition are working on GTA clones (some of the Freespace crew are still there but some left a while back to start a new studio).

In an interview with gamespot (see wiki of Interplay), they said were looking to build off the Earthworm Jim, Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance, Descent, and MDK IP’s. MDK is a pretty old game and not well known cant see them using that but Earthworm Jim and Descent are probably worth a go.

Not sure about Fallout MMORPG, some murkiness around the IP of Fallout and online games with Bethesda I heard Bethesda snapped up the remaining rights to Fallout so Interplay has no right to use Fallout online unless they license it from Bethesda ?.

They re-hired the old lead artist from fallout 1 and he talked a lot about mmo’s a while back and I think it’s pretty obvious the first thing they’ll do is fallout, you alone in the waste that are now heavily populated by lots of idiots shouting chuck norris ftw.

Blackthorne = Blizzard, so that won’t be happening. MDK and Earthworm Jim = Shiny, so they might make another one but it wouldn’t be the same. In fact, given Shiny’s recent track record, even if they got Shiny to do it, it’d still probably suck. Descent I got over long ago. Fallout Online is a terrible idea. So….erm. Another BG: Dark Alliance would probably be the best possible outcome. They’re not Baldur’s Gate proper, of course, but they’re about the best same-screen cooperative experience to be had on consoles.

Not sure about Fallout MMORPG, some murkiness around the IP of Fallout and online games with Bethesda I heard Bethesda snapped up the remaining rights to Fallout so Interplay has no right to use Fallout online unless they license it from Bethesda ?.

Descent was the first game I played on PC (having been a Sega boy). It was brilliant, as was the sequel. The projects to keep the games going (D2X for example) have reawakened my love, but a further genuine instalment would have my eye.